Josh Hartnett’s career continues to take a strange path.

The once popular studio actor has just finished post on the Asian gangster movie I COME WITH THE RAIN where he plays an L.A. Cop who moves out to Hong Kong in search of a missing billionaire and now comes word from Variety of another upcoming project straight out of left field.

This time it’s BUNRAKU, where Hartnett will play an un-named, revenge-seeking loner in an alternative universe. The film is in production at the awesomely titled Snoot Entertainment and is said to have been inspired by Japanese puppetry (as illustrated by a Bunraku performance as shown below), video games and even German expressionism which will result in a spaghetti-Western-Samurai-Gangster mash-up flick.

I don’t quite know what the hell to make of that plot description but it sounds pretty awesome and totally weird.

The film will shoot in Europe this Spring from unknown director Guy Moshe.